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Haspel, the CIA, Government and Morality

This isn’t morality at all, it is political posturing. It should be rejected with extreme prejudice.

May 23, 2018 12:54 p.m. ET

In his comments on Gina Haspel (“At the CIA, Immorality Is Part of the Job,” op-ed, May 17), Fay Vincent suggests that morality is at best tangentially related to the rule of law. The great tradition of Western jurisprudence would strongly disagree. Moses and Jeremiah, Plato, Aristotle, Jesus, St. Paul, St. Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Barth, Bonhoeffer, Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr.—all uniformly affirmed that justice, morality and positive law are intimately connected in any good society. Statecraft, certainly no less than war, must be conducted within the confines of legal norms connected to...